Case Study: Learn How Fluent Understood User Emotions To Guide Their Product-Market Fit Journey
Understanding the emotions of your users is critical to spending time building the right features for your product or services.
Author’s Note: Make sure you read all the way to the very end (this is a very long Case Study)! The Founder File and Gavin’s email is at the end of the Case Study!
Introduction:
Gavin Dove is the CEO and a co-founder of Fluent. Learning new vocab and grammar is only the first step to learning a language - what you've learned needs to become second nature if you want to have a conversation or read a novel. The practice for this takes years and is where language apps fail users - after the initial lessons, they are left on their own to gain fluency - all while trying to stay engaged with language practice for the many months needed to even see progress.
We at Fluent make the language you're learning second nature by having you "live in it" through your web browsing. Fluent swaps out words and phrases in the web content you read for those of the language you're learning - you see translations, in context, over and over again, until you know the translation like you know your native language - it fits seamlessly into your life while building your language skills, like an audiobook, or a standing desk.
Executive Summary:
Problem: Applying A Light (But Firm) Touch To Shape User Behavior
Shaping or creating new user behaviors for your product or service is difficult. Gavin was focused on understanding his users emotions first, then creating a process to map Fluent features to user’s behaviors that would enhance product engagement.Market: Target The Most Demanding Customer Group First
Gavin correctly identifies solving tough problems that your users face as a moat against current and future competitors. If your competitors can’t solve the most pressing problems users faces, there’s no reason for your customer’s to stray away from using your product or service.Solution: Design Your Product Or Service Around User Emotions
Fluent’s path to product-market fit was set by their user’s emotions while using their product. Specifically, they found the key to high user engagement was user curiosity, so they built features that would cultivate curiosity, which led to greater customer satisfaction.Team: Make Decisions Based On The Startup’s Core Value Proposition
Fluent’s north star in their PMF journey was the ease of learning a new language while browsing the internet. Thus, the team was highly disciplined measuring all product development decisions against their startup’s value prop, allowing them to stay focused in building what they users need to learn best.Takeaway: Stick Close Your Users And Their Feedback Will Guide You To PMF
Fluent kept their focus narrow by constantly talking with their users. Their tight feedback loop allows them to quickly figure out what needs to be built to turn their regular users into power users, which is a clear mark of finding PMF.
Case Study: Fluent
Problem: Applying A Light (But Firm) Touch To Shape User Behavior
What are the key problems you've had to solve on your journey to product-market fit?
Balancing newly created behavior (language learning) while being everywhere in peoples' day-to-day web-browsing is tough. You need to be "in their face" enough to create a learning behavior while "staying out of their way" so they don't get too annoyed.
You also need to be in the right mindset at the moment you're learning. These moments are rare - if you're stressed out about work or distracted, you're not going to retain anything. Even worse, learning something new is inherently painful. You need to challenge your assumptions and struggle with the unknown. You need a strong motivator or emotion to drive learning.
Why are these problems important to solve for creating the best solution for your customer?
Language immersion (whether digital like Fluent or traveling to a new country) only works if the learner is actively engaging with the language around them. If learners aren't consistently pushed to engage with the language (whether through gamification, curiosity, or something else), they'll fail to pick it up in the end. Most learners will be left behind while only the most motivated make it to the finish line. It would completely defeat the purpose of language immersion, which is the most effective way to learn a language.
One of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten is to view everything through your core value proposition. It's the only valuable thing you have as an early startup. You're the world-leading expert on it. You need to study your value prop deeply, constantly iterate on it, and constantly try to disprove it. Everything else (go to market, revenue model, beachhead market) builds around it or on top of it.
The process for identifying pain points in your product is no different - your core value prop is where you start. Every single time we talk to our users, we ask questions that help us define our value prop in the context of their lives. Here are a few frameworks (inspired by the works of Bob Moesta) that we rely on when talking to them:
What *better* version of themselves are your users relying on your product to become? Your product is merely a means to an end for your users - knowing what "finish line" they're trying to get to and how your product helps them get there is the start of your value proposition. For example, with Fluent, many of our users want to learn a new language to become closer to their loved ones who speak it.
What was their old approach before they switched to your product? There's the inertia of old habits that must be overcome when switching to a new product. So, their old approach needs to be broken in some way so that it causes them to look for something new. This is where another major piece of your core value proposition lies - its contrast with older, "broken" solutions! The majority of Fluent users are former users of language learning apps - that they couldn't stay engaged with long enough to make progress in the language.
Now we need to understand the types of motivation a user has for achieving their goals. These roughly break down into emotional, social, and functional motivations. Pay particular attention to emotions when talking to your users! These are so, so powerful. They're the key to forming new behaviors around your product. Look at how their face changes when you ask them about using your product. You need to dig deeper into any strong emotion you see. Understanding which parts of your product trigger which emotions will guide you as you iterate your product. Positive emotions (delight, surprise, satisfaction, achievement) generally come from your core value prop helping users achieve their goals. Find the processes that trigger these emotions, and amplify them. Negative emotions (frustration, confusion, anxiety) usually come from something BLOCKING your core value proposition. These must be hunted down and removed, or your product will die.
Now that you have all the pieces to understanding your core value prop (and your users' relationship to it), you can FINALLY figure out which pain points to solve. Running a startup and iterating product is a constant exercise of focus. There are simultaneously a thousand issues with your product to solve. Cut through the noise by ONLY solving problems that help the most users experience your value prop and the greatest degree.
Market: Target The Most Demanding Customer Group First
Once you identified the critical problems to solve, what led you to realize there was a huge market opportunity to be unlocked by doing so?
An insane number of people fail to reach independence (communication without others' help) in the language they're learning. It's even worse if English is your primary language because most commerce and culture already exist in your native tongue. Out of all English students trying to learn a second language, about 91% fail to reach language independence.
We have billions of people trying to learn a language, combined with teaching methods where a vast majority of learners fail to make headway. On the other hand, even anecdotally, everyone knows that immersion is effective. We've all heard stories from a cousin who went to Spain for a few months and came back nearly fluent. So the opportunity here is to bring the effectiveness of language immersion to billions of people, without them needing to buy a plane ticket and travel to a new country.
We have the opportunity to teach everything that an enormous language learning app like Duolingo or Babbel (both billion-dollar companies) can teach but through the much more effective language immersion process. This would be revolutionary - the majority of aspirational language learners would succeed instead of fail. So many more people could pick up a language because of how much easier it is. The world would become smaller and more connected. We'd appreciate each other's cultures more deeply. That's very much a world I want to live in.
There are most likely several segments of the market you could choose to attack first. What section of the total customer base did you focus on first to establish product-market fit, and why?
We're targeting intermediate-level language learners first. This is because they've demonstrated a strong intent to learn a language, and they've personally experienced the struggle to keep up with language practice the Fluent solves.
Eventually, we'll unlock beginners and people who haven't even realized they're interested in learning a language yet (we've encountered a surprising number in our user interviews). Still, you need to start with a few customers who LOVE your product instead of many customers who feel meh about it.
We also like intermediate-level learners because they're a harder group to build for. They'll notice when your translations are off, and they want to learn more advanced areas of the language - grammar rules, exceptions, idioms. This is the stuff that's more difficult to build Fluent to teach, but it also gives us the potential to add so much more value to their language learning experience and ensure they love our product.
We also want to solve the hard problems first because, in a sense, as they act as a moat. Solving these problems first weeds out any low-execution competitors who aren't willing to run up the flight of stairs with you.
Honestly, we try to do as much as possible, through as many channels as possible. Our research ranges from deep explorations (hour-long user interviews) to quick ratings inside Fluent. Like with anything else you want to encourage, you need to make this process low friction. Your chances of getting an important piece of feedback decrease if your customers have to jump over hurdles to talk to you. A few successful strategies we found were:
Adding opportunities for feedback as close as possible to the point of engagement. For us, this means having a "chat with a founder" right inside the extension itself - so there's no need to visit another URL! This is by far our highest engagement feedback channel.
Creating a central place for users to SHARE feedback and view/add to other user's feedback. This often re-surfaces forgotten suggestions and bugs they experienced. If one person reported it, there are probably ten others that were thinking about it! By allowing voting users to vote on suggestions/bugs to fix, we can understand how widespread these sentiments are.
Finding a few "champion" users who get the most out of your core value prop and give good feedback. These folks are gold! Invest in a relationship with them, and they'll show you the deeper meaning of your product. The more you talk with them, the more quickly you'll be able to dig into the specific emotions/intentions/philosophies around your product. In short, the feedback from these users compounds in usefulness over time. I can list a few users we talk to when, if we hadn't talked to them, Fluent would be months behind.
It's also important to know what you can get out of each research channel. Longer interviews are better for exploration and learning new things about your product. If you follow a detailed set of questions, you won't learn as much as if you let the user lead and dig into whatever interesting thing they say. Lastly, these interviews are a great source of marketing copy. We include all of the Fluent team in user interviews, but it's particularly important for whoever marketing to be involved. If a user tells you exactly why they get value out of your product, you can use this in your copy! Use your users to convert new users!
We also want to solve the hard problems first because, in a sense, as they act as a moat.
Solution: Design Your Product Or Service Around User Emotions
How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit?
We cracked this problem when we paid attention to our users' emotions throughout their Fluent usage and used these feelings to drive new behaviors.
We learned quickly that when you're stressed about a deadline for work or didn't get much sleep the night before, you couldn't care less about learning a language. Because the magic of Fluent comes from it being "always-on," Fluent needs to be "cognitively lightweight" for when you're just reading through an article and aren't in the mindset to learn - it can't distract you and pull you out of your workflow.
The flip side here is that Fluent needs to be right in front of you for any of the moments you're mindset to learn, ready to teach you more. You shouldn't need to remember to open an app or dig out your Spanish textbook. Instead, you hover over a translation and get a language lesson right in the context of the page. The ease of learning fosters curiosity, and when people are genuinely curious about something, they engage deeply with it. This engagement then becomes a very strong basis for forming a new habit - and paints our path to product-market fit.
How did you design the sales process and go-to-market strategy to reach your target audience best and ultimate end user?
This mostly came from the users themselves. Before we wrote a single line of code, we spoke to dozens of language learners. As we wrote the code, we spoke to dozens more. Hunting down language learners to talk to give us a pretty good idea of where they hang out and where to target our initial launches. The community has been a huge one for us. Learning a language is such a long and arduous journey that you almost NEED to seek others' support. So all these highly engaged language learning communities have popped up around the internet. These were, and still are, our starting points for spreading the word about Fluent.
The other incredible thing we've noticed is the word of mouth spread. Many of the users we bring into Fluent recommend us to a few of their friends. One person we spoke to recommended us to 10 of her friends! This has been a pretty decent portion of our growth lately, and we plan to learn on going forwards. We see this as a barometer of how effective our product is, and as we iterate the product, we expect the growth rate here to increase significantly. We've built a few basic features, such as a referral system, to take advantage of this, and have a few more features planned to take this further!
What are the things you did that don't scale to better shape your product development?
We built custom translation and NLP engines for the two languages that we support, French and Spanish. There's so much more than just vocab that can be learned in a language - grammar rules, idioms, tenses. By keeping our focus very narrow, we can engineer Fluent to dig deep into each language's intricacies. We can provide continuous value for a user as they progress through their learning journey. We want to be with a language learner throughout their entire journey - from just learning the vocabulary to learning local idioms to fluency.
Once you know WHICH problems are the highest priority (the ones that unlock the most value in your core value prop, for the most users), you need to figure out how to solve them effectively. Here are a few tactics that increased the effectiveness of our execution:
Obsessing over metrics. I wish we learned this one earlier. It pays to track (in great detail) engagement metrics with your product. Unless you're a data scientist, you should probably use a tool like MixPanel, or Amplitude, or a combination of both - they have a very rich set of analyses that you can use very quickly. We went the route of building our custom metrics tracking initially, and this was a mistake. It's less about building the perfect measure and more about the ability to VERY QUICKLY explore your data. When there's no friction to exploring, you end up doing it way more. This is how you'll stumble into deep insights about your own product. If we did this with Fluent earlier, we would have quickly found that users were getting frustrated by Fluent when they weren't in the mindset to learn - and our product would be about four months ahead of where it is now.
Not being afraid to make a product decision based on "intuition." Most of the Fluent team has an engineering background, so naturally, we like to make decisions when there's data to back them up. That said, if (and that's a big if) you've constantly been talking to users, the pattern matching that's formed your intuition is a great source of intuitive wisdom. It's often better to quickly decide on intuition (and even be proven wrong) than deferring the decision indefinitely. One of Fluent's features that gets the highest engagement (and leads to the most retained users) was built on a quick, intuitive decision.
Finally, we've found great success in using the "experimental" framework for building the features that solve product problems. This boils down to building a hypothesis on your problem's root cause by talking to users and digging into product metrics. Then you need to try and PROVE THIS HYPOTHESIS WRONG IN EVERY POSSIBLE (QUICK) WAY. Use your metrics, and talk to your users some more. Any work you do here, in proving yourself wrong, will save you days and weeks of work down the road. Any hypothesis that makes it through this trial by fire is something you'll have great confidence in building features for.
Team: Make Decisions Based On The Startup’s Core Value Proposition
How did you handle conflicts between you and your cofounder when making product decisions at critical junctures to arrive at product-market fit?
For us, there are two parts to this, making sure we start with a common understanding and making sure we argue constructively:
To give good input for product decisions, everyone needs to have a common understanding about the product - so, everyone at Fluent talks to our users. We share our learnings every time we talk to them. One of our core values is to teach each other the things we learn (even outside of user interviews) as we learn them. We must bring each other along as our thoughts evolve. This way, we have the same basis/knowledge of each decision's priorities, opportunities, and pitfalls. Everyone brings their perspective to a product discussion, but there's never disagreement about the situation's basic principles/reality.
We still argue constantly, though, albeit in a constructive way. We all know that we each have the best intentions for Fluent and our users. Because of this common understanding, there's much less arguing over semantics/core principles. Because we all have the best intentions for Fluent, we're all happy to eat our humble pie and be proven wrong if it means we find the right answer and move closer to product-market fit.
The main thing we measure product decisions against is whether it adds to, or takes away from, our core value proposition. Usually, this is enough - but if it's not, we find that the best heuristic for coming to a decision is re-framing the argument with an experienced mentor or following along with whoever is the most passionate about it (because it usually means they'll execute on it extremely well too).
What essential qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?
As a team, do we gain or lose energy from sharing and building upon ideas with them? This is very important because, at our stage, our mission, and the energy we gain from each other's company are the only things that'll maintain our momentum in difficult times.
Intellectual honesty. Building a startup is an incredibly optimistic endeavor. The chances you make it all the way are very small. So, you need to have a vision that you truly believe will let you prevail in the end. But, you can't have blind faith in the big vision. This is where a lot of founders go wrong, in my opinion. They fall into their reality distortion field and ignore that their ship is on fire because their vision so blinds them. So you need to hire people who care about the current reality of things; people who won't hide the truth behind a cherry-picked metric. You need the courage to notice the moment that something's gone wrong, tell the rest of the team, and fix it ASAP.
The openness and desire to share interesting things you've learned. The main advantage of having more people on your team is it increases your team's collective knowledge and wisdom. It's critical that every time someone learns something, they share it, so the team's combined wisdom increases. Instead of the whole team making a mistake, only one person does. Instead of only one person finding a hack to make something more efficient, the whole team becomes more efficient.
We've found that it's not so much about the motivation to grow - the constant learning is the most addicting part of a startup. I wouldn't even recognize my own mindset from 6 months ago - and this is endlessly compelling. Perhaps we've been lucky in finding each other, but the entire team shares this mindset. It's hard to imagine being in an environment where there ISN'T constant personal/professional growth now.
The main struggle with personal/professional growth is the ANXIETY inherent in it. You need to challenge your old views to create new ones constantly. You need to dive headfirst into the unknown every day. This is the scary bit - lack of motivation is never the issue. We've gotten around this anxiety by personal baking growth right into our culture. We constantly evolve our views as a team because we constantly challenge one other's ideas - even if we agree with them. When someone's proven wrong, we extend an olive branch rather than making fun of them. This lets us find holes in plans and creates an atmosphere where there's much less anxiety in advocating for an idea, being proven wrong, and adopting a new mindset or learning.
Takeaway: Stick Close Your Users And Their Feedback Will Guide You To PMF
What are the key lessons you have learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?
The biggest lesson by far is to talk to your users regularly. As an engineer, I've made the mistake of thinking that "If I make this technology cool enough, the people will come." That was a harsh lesson and is something I'll never do again. The funny thing is I had heard that before and didn't think it was necessary. I almost think I had to make the mistake to realize how important this was.
As a founder, you need to be intentional about what's worth your time and what's not worth your time. There are a thousand things to do; probably only a handful are essential for moving the needle. It's easy to get anxious in these situations and do what you're good at or what you're used to because it's comforting. Breaking this habit takes intentionality! If you ask yourself whether the thing you're about to do is the most important thing to do at that moment, you'll be ahead of 90% of other startups out there.
Narrow your focus to become exceptional at one thing (and this should be a key piece of your core value prop). The biggest constraint on a startup is time. Most people think that if you raise a bunch of money, you can exchange money for time (by hiring), but this isn't true - hiring in exchange for time has diminishing returns. The more people you hire, the more time you'll spend managing people instead of building. Knowing this, you must guard your team's time jealously, and the best way to do this is to focus on being exceptional at one thing rather than being alright at many things. It is much better to have a smaller set of CRAZY users for your product than a larger group of users who think it's "kind of cool."
What's the hardest problem you're facing now after solving the prior one(s)?
How do we personalize Fluent to each user to maximize their engagement with the language? It's a matter of picking the perfect translations, grammar rules, and idioms that engage each user's interests and difficulty level to make them the most curious and drive the most engagement as they try to answer their curiosity. This all needs to be done in a way where there's no onerous onboarding where it takes ages to fill in interests or an arduous "knowledge quiz" that assesses a user's knowledge level. (This would be the antithesis of Fluent's learn while you live your life value proposition.)
Fluent’s Founder File (Click To Access):
Feel free to reach Gavin at: gavin@usefluent.co
Also, Fluent is hiring a founding engineer right now! Email him if you would like to be considered for the position.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Justin Hunt, Founder of Blaise Transit: Blaise Transit is an AI-based software platform that enables transit companies to provide uber-like services with their bus fleet.
Farhaj Mayan, Founder of Kanna: Kanna is a platform that connects qualified workers to jobs in the cannabis industry.
Dival Banerjee, Founder of Vuecason: Vuecason allows you to print metal like plastic.
Previous F2F Case Studies:
Case Study: Eze Relied On Fast Product Iteration To Reach Their Product-Market Fit Goals
Case Study: Blerp CEO Aaron Hsu's Search For Product-Market Fit
Case Study: Arize AI's Cofounders Discuss Their Path Towards Product-Market Fit
Case Study: Vizy CEO Amos Gewirtz Figured Out How To Increase User Engagement Of Their Product
Case Study: Doppler (backed by Sequoia) CEO Brian Vallelunga Found Growth By Killing A Product
Case Study: Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt On How His Startup Achieved Product-Market Fit
Case Study: Segment President Ilya Volodarsky On How To Effectively Use Data Analytics In A Startup
Case Study: Behind The Fundraising And Founder Success with Instabug's Omar Gabr
Case Study: Paragon CTO Ishmael Samuel Reflects On How He Chose His Cofounder
Previous Startup Spotlights:
If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out my other work on LinkedIn. Follow me on Twitter @fredsoda, on Medium @fredsoda, and on Instagram @fred_soda.